The Cypriot Fiddler: An Oral History of Traditional Music-Making in Cyprus in the Twentieth Century

Nicoletta Demetriou presents the findings of her research project, documentary, and book on the Cypriot fiddler, tracing the oral history of traditional musicians in early and mid-twentieth-century Cyprus. Growing out of fieldwork begun in 2005 and developed between 2012 and 2019 at the University of Oxford, the project records the life stories of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot musicians who were active professionally before the 1960s. Throughout the lecture, Demetriou screens filmed interview excerpts.

In Cyprus, the term violaris (fiddler) refers both to the violinist and to the paired ensemble of violin and laouto. For most of the twentieth century, fiddling was a supplementary occupation for rural men of limited means, treated as a practical craft alongside carpentry, building, or cobbling. Public music-making was almost exclusively male; exceptions were made for blind women, such as Lellou from Limassol, for whom music was an accepted means of earning a living, and for women perceived as departing from conventional female social roles. Because lessons were expensive, apprenticeships lasted only six months to a year. Students learned either by ear or, under prominent urban teachers such as Yiannis Solomonidis (Giannouthi) in Nicosia, through handwritten staff notation.

Fiddlers were essential to village weddings, where music enacted rituals such as dressing the bride and groom and sewing the bridal mattress, as well as providing entertainment at feasts and religious fairs. Before gramophones and radios entered coffee shops and homes, fiddlers introduced new tunes to rural audiences; later, audiences demanded European and Latin American dances, Greek and Turkish records, and local repertoire alike. In Nicosia, Greek Cypriot musicians gathered for hire at Yorgos Mavrofilippos's coffee shop, while Turkish Cypriot musicians met outside the Kumarçılar Han (Gamblers' Inn). At Turkish Cypriot weddings, the violin and laouto often alternated with the zurna and davul.

Demetriou attributes the decline of the profession to urbanisation after independence in 1960, the expansion of ensembles to include bouzouki, and the events and partition of 1974, which displaced communities and replaced multi-day village weddings with short receptions in halls. After describing the 2015 crowdfunding campaign for her documentary and its premiere at the Home for Cooperation in Nicosia, she answers questions on contemporary musical revivals, a 1920s Nicosia musicians' pact against gramophone recording, intercommunal performances before 1963 in villages around Louroujina and Omodos, diaspora fiddlers in the United Kingdom, and a family of female musicians in Nicosia.